Books

America Lost

Walking between Venice and the Abbot Kinney area in 1992 I visited a couple of thrift stores looking for vintage T-Shirts to take back to the UK.

The last Thrift shop was more of a junk shop affair with a back room of stacked boxes and numerous lazy skinny cats asleep in boxes of magazines, clothing amongst other things. About to leave and one of the boxes caught my eye, some vintage Box Brownie camera's and a bunch of other vintage camera's and lenses, asking if I could take a look the not very interested owner just nodded and i started digging through the box.

The box contained around 10 cameras and some old boxes of slides, looking through a few of them they instantly interested me more than the cameras, I carried the box to the counter and the owner perked up when I asked how much for the lot. The hard sell began, $10 per piece for the camera's he told me he had another box of slides (probably hidden beneath an emaciated cat in the back) he returned with an old California Orange box full of old Kodakchrome and Sear's transparencies boxes. He started at over $100 for the lot and I left with the lot for $30, he was fine with the price and even said keep the box. Generous guy.

Back to my rented pad above the famous Rip Cronk painted mural on Venice Beach I unscrewed the shade of my bedside lamp to view the slides. The majority were from New York and areas of California around the 50's and 60's Family gatherings, Vacation's, Christmas and general lost times. A thousand moments that must have been so important to the people that took the shots but ended up in a junk store.

Who were the people in the frames? I started placing Ads in the White pages and started buying up unwanted snaps, I continue to collect vintage photographs and get the same buzz now that I had when I found that box in Venice.